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What the GOP can learn from the Dems' comeback

By AL FROM

December 03, 2013

With Democrats reeling from the botched Obamacare rollout, Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief, smug in the knowledge that the political damage they suffered by forcing the government shutdown may not hurt them in the 2014 congressional elections. But it’s likely to appear in the 2016 race for the White House.

Republicans always faced an uphill fight to win back the presidency. That was clear last year. With unemployment hovering at nearly 8 percent and most Americans believing the country was on the wrong track, the GOP expected to win the 2012 presidential election. Instead, President Barack Obama’s reelection marked the fifth time in six elections that the Republicans lost the popular vote for president. Voters have come to see the Republicans as brain-dead and out of touch with a changing America. Their shutdown fiasco only reinforced that image.

So what can they do? They can learn from how Democrats came back from landslide losses in presidential elections in the 1980s.

Political memories tend to be short, but just 25 years ago the fortunes of the two parties were reversed. In 1988, the Democrats lost an election they expected to win, their fifth defeat in six presidential elections. Twice, in 1972 and in 1984, the Democratic candidate lost 49 states. Like today’s Republicans, the Democrats of the 1980s were out of touch, out of ideas and out of power. We were in grave danger of going the way of the Whigs.

Tired of being routed, we formed the insurgent Democratic Leadership Council to forge a new national agenda that make us competitive in national elections. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency, having prepared for his run by chairing the DLC.

I’m not in the business of advising Republicans, but America needs two strong, competitive political parties. Here are four important lessons the Republicans could learn from our comeback.

Like the tea party in the Republican Party today, liberal activists dominated Democratic forums and defined the party in the 1980s — and as long as they did, Democrats were also-rans in presidential elections. Political leaders and rank-and-file Democrats outside Washington, eager to win back the White House, needed a power center of their own to lead the battle for the soul of the party. The DLC took on that role. We traveled the country with a new generation of national leaders, held our own conventions and backed new ideas like national service, welfare reform, community policing and charter schools. With Clinton’s emergence in 1992, our winning message became the message of the Democratic Party.

Republicans need their own version of the DLC to do battle with the tea party for the soul of their party. GOP governors, business leaders and donors who want to win back the White House need to create their own power center that projects a different, less extreme, national Republican message and encourages moderate Republicans to participate in GOP primaries. They need to come to grips with the reality that an extreme party image hurts their candidate. And, they need a concerted effort to change that. Ask Mitt Romney.

2. Second, they need to start standing for ideas the American people want to support. Ideas matter in politics.

Republicans would do well to heed Clinton’s words when he assumed the chairmanship of the DLC in March 1990. “Any political resurgence for the Democrats depends on the intellectual resurgence of our party,” he said. “There’s far too much talk about personality in politics and far too little about what we are going to say and do that makes sense to the American people.”

Party leaders who care about winning the presidency should declare a moratorium on candidate talk in 2014 and focus their energies on forging an agenda that their candidate can take into the general election and that appeals to voters they’ve been turning away. Then their candidate will have something to run on — as opposed to a party image to run away from in 2016.

3. Third, they need to forget about party unity. It’s overrated.

If the Republicans learned anything from the shutdown debacle, it should be that trying to preserve party unity at all costs gives the extremists far too much power and pulls the party away from the political mainstream. A Republican Party unified on terms acceptable to the tea party will not win the presidency.

Just look at what happened to us in the 1980s: Party leaders accused the DLC of dividing the Democratic Party. Guilty. Democrats weren’t losing the White House because we were divided; we were losing because, even when unified, we were attracting far too few voters to win a national election. In 1984, by Washington standards, Walter Mondale led a unified party. Nearly all party leaders and interest group leaders endorsed him before the primaries even began. But he nearly lost the nomination to insurgent candidate Gary Hart and went on to lose 49 states to President Ronald Reagan. We didn’t need to unify our party; we needed to expand it.

Like the Democrats of the 1980s, today’s Republicans need to broaden their appeal.

4. Fourth, they need to become more inclusive and culturally tolerant. They need to welcome Hispanic voters, the fastest growing segment of the electorate, and stop turning them away with unwelcoming policies like “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants. And they cannot continue to allow intolerant extremists on the cultural right to drive away voters, particularly women, who disagree with them on gay marriage and abortion but may agree with them on other issues.

They would do well to study how Clinton handled the abortion issue in 1992. He said abortion should be safe, legal and rare. He never compromised his pro-choice belief, and he knew he would not win votes from the most extreme pro-life voters. But most voters are not on the extremes of the abortion issue — whether pro-choice or pro-life. In 1992, a substantial part of the electorate was what I characterize as soft pro-life. They were against abortion most of the time, but not in every instance. By saying abortion should be rare, Clinton was telling those voters that while he disagreed with them, he understood why someone might have concerns about abortion. As a result, many of those soft pro-life voters were open to examining Clinton’s positions on other issues, and when they did, many of them voted for him.

Those four lessons are not a panacea for all the ills of the Republicans. But learning them would be a good start.

Al From, principal of The From Company, is founder of the Democratic Leadership Council and the author of the new book “The New Democrats and the Return to Power.”

Al From is founder the Democratic Leadership Council. This article is adapted from his new book, The New Democrats and the Return to Power.